Humble Giants

I recently noticed that mountains have been stalking me for a while - since I was a child. Their constant presence over the horizon, their edges pronounced by the setting since their deceptive blue calmness - always staking me. Most of my life, I’ve had the Appalachians beside me, their old-rounded forms looking over the horizons. After a few years of living in a city with no mountains nearby, I’ve grown great fondness for my beloved Appalachian.

These great Earth-giants have lived for such a long time. They have seen much, experienced much more and have gained invaluable wisdom, yet they are far form being the tallest peaks. They were tall and jagged at some point, but even they being so humble, have bowed down to the winds, their faces chiseled and weathered. As time passed, their wisdom grew, and their apparent height diminished, illustrating their great humility.

To express my admiration for these humble beings, I was given the opportunity through presentation practice in class this week. Following my theme of “two birds in one shot”, I chose this presentation as a way of not only practicing public speaking and controlling the inevitable, nervous jitters but for other equally important reasons. As I mentioned before, it was my chance to express gratitude to the mountains of my life. However, it was also for me to expand on this idea of humility and test my mountain theory. As a reminder to myself, I realized without humility, I would not even be able to realize the progress and improvement that could always be made.

Speaking of improvement, I chose to experiment with certain elements in my presentation. Although I continued to face the issue of going above the time limit, I wanted to explore increased audience participation and inclusion. I wanted to also explore using dynamic elements to tailor my presentation to the audience’s response. For the first time, I utilized a poll to have more audience members participate and interact with my presentation. However, it took more time than I had planned for. It was also more complicated with viewing results, more than necessary. Therefore this presentation was a way for me to experiment with finding options of better including the listeners. It became clear that the poll is a viable idea, however is more challenging to organize, especially with larger audiences.

Along with speaking with more confidence and having a more direct and cleaner message, I was able to channelize my progress in presentation giving to my original work project. After more research, I learned about constructing the neural networks within an encoder, including position wise feed-forward networks and multi-head attention. However I am curious to better understand why and how matrices are multiplied in certain ways, and what exactly the math is, behind the scenes.